XFX Radeon HD7850 2GB Black Edition Review

Posted by Legit Staff| Thu, Jul 26, 2012 - 12:00 AM

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XFX Radeon HD7850 Black Edition DD

In early March AMD released their Radeon HD7850 and HD7870 of video cards to the market, and now we’re going to be taking a look at XFX’s Radeon HD7850 DD Black Edition. XFX has decided to take the 7850 design, overclock it, and put on a pretty beefy cooler. Instead of your reference clocks of 860Mhz on the core and 1200Mhz memory clocks, the Black Edition card features 975Mhz on the core and 1250Mhz memory clocks.

Taking a look at the front of the 7850 Black Edition we can see that it’s got a dual fan setup, which is blowing air straight down onto the aluminum fins of the heatsink, which has four copper heatpipes soldered directly to the fins.

XFX decided to recycle some 7870 PCBs, which is why you see this 7850 using two external power connectors instead of the reference card’s one power connector. Now this doesn’t mean we’re getting a 7870 GPU at the price of a 7850, this simply means they are cutting costs by not having to design a new PCB.

Here you can get glimpse of the heatpipes used on the XFX 7850 Black Edition. There are four of them total, and they are soldered directly to the aluminum fins of the heatsink.

Looking down at the top of the card we can see that there isn’t much different here from XFX’s other Black Edition Radeon 7000 Series GPUs. One thing to note here, again, is that the 7850 Black Edition uses two PCI-Express 6-Pin power connectors instead of the single six pin used by the reference 7850. With the 7850 Black Edition using two six pin power connectors your minimum wattage and amperage should be 500 Watts with 30 amps on the 12V rail.

Rotating around the card around so we can see the video connectors we see two mini display port 1.2 connectors, an HDMI 1.4 connector, as well as dual link DVI-I connectors. We can also see our exhaust area, which has the XFX logo cut out for even more airflow.